Should We Be Giving Your USB Port Last Rites?

Your hard drive is talking to your PC chassis in eSATA, and the manufacturers of computers have gotten the idea you'd like to talk that way too without climbing inside the box. Hello eSATA port! Goodbye USB?

"Definitely in 2007, you'll see this populated as a standard feature on high-end PCs. In 2008, you'll see that populated further into mainstream products," said John Gleason, manager of worldwide consumer PC marketing for Hewlett-Packard, currently the top-ranked PC seller.
The higher speeds of eSATA compared with USB could grow more obvious as consumers try to wrestle with ever-larger quantities of videos, photos, music and other data. "Backing up a terabyte across a USB port would be incredibly painful. That's going to drive demand for a high-speed port like eSATA, said Roger Bradford, who leads storage work for Intel's chipset and graphics marketing group.